Working

It was exciting to see student use the smART lab space this past week. I still need to organize items to best fit our needs, but this was a great start!

Students finally began to dive into their first major theme of the semester: You, Me, Everybody. In doing so, they started developing sketches and ideas of what they wanted to create for their work and using the various skill-building exercises, applied the media they deemed most appropriate for the assignment.

This is always an exciting time in the classroom because there is so much happening and so much potential for what can still happen. I am excited to see these works develop over the next week and be submitted to our online gallery for a grade.

Here are some of the works in progress below:

Panels Complete

We finally finished the larger set of panels this week. It was a lot of work to get them completed, but I think the results were worth it. These will now go into the office for display in our conference room.

Miniature Hideaways

In my 3D Design class this week, we glazed our descriptive word ceramic forms and started the miniature hideaway project. We are using celluclay to cover the forms and so far it is working out quite nicely.

I am excited to see these works finish up next week and then get photographed on location.

I am particularly excited to see how students apply the finishing touches and where they decide to photograph their work.

Meijer Great Choices

Finally this week, students were given the opportunity to participate in the Meijer Great Choices Film Festival by creating videos on topic-specific content like Celebrating Diversity and Making Healthy Choices. We had two entries for this year and you will be able to vote for them starting on March 1 by going here.

On the News

Monday kicked off with student work being featured on our local news as a part of a segment that highlighted a grant program we received in 2016. It was fun to see student work featured as other teachers are encouraged to apply for the TangerKIDS grant this year. I am hoping to receive another grant this year for a project idea I have to transform our hallways into a gallery for student work.

Building Skills

Since moving to more choices for projects in our classroom, I have found that the beginning weeks of skill-building exercises have been important in challenging students abilities to manipulate materials and work with a variety of concepts in their work. The hope of these skill-builders is to equip students with the tools needed for them to independently develop and work on the thematic works we do in class in a way that is both informed and intentional.

This week, we worked on the use of line and watercolor techniques as we continued to explore ideas of portraits as a way to capture the likeness of others - well, actually maybe the opposite of that. Using blind contour and bilateral drawings, students used their observation skills to draw, but most definitely ended up with very abstract outcomes. We used this opportunity to discuss that as artists, we have the option of how we want to portray our subject. Sometimes it calls for more realism and sometimes it needs to be more abstract or expressive.

It was a fun process to take students through and I will be interested to see if any of them end up applying it to their final works as we get moving on our "You, Me, Everybody" themed projects.

Lexi

Brayden

Olivia

Ellie

Clay in STEAM Class

I am teaching a STEAM class as a part of my schedule this semester. This is my first time teaching STEAM and developing a curriculum that asks students to use their art skills and design thinking to tackle ideas and concepts across other disciplines.

In this class, students have a "Have to" and "Can do" project for each of the letters in STEAM. This means that there is one teacher-directed project and one student-direct project within Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics.

For our first set of projects that are Science-based, students had to work with clay and create a piece that could play music/sound. The design of the ceramic works were based on endangered species.

In addition to this, students also had the opportunity to hear from two of our high school ceramic students as they visited and demonstrated their abilities on the wheel. It was awesome for students to hear how they work with the clay to create their works and in doing so, explain the chemistry of the clay and the physics of throwing and manipulating forms on the wheel.

This opportunity to have skills students present to our younger students is something that I hope to do more of in the future. I was very proud of all of the students who asked questions and the way those questions were answered.

It was also a great opportunity for our large Empty Bowls bowl to be created for auction on our upcoming Fine Arts night, known as Arts a la Mode. I am excited to get this piece fired and glazed. I have some fun ideas for how to best glaze it (those hands you see next to it are going in the kiln shortly and have helped inspired some ideas).

From Objects to Art

This week in 3D, students worked on finishing up their object sculptures. Some more will be finished next week. It was fun to see students work with multiples of the same object and create a form from something you would see in the everyday in a non-art way.

I have really enjoyed seeing these students take on challenges and apply their skills and understanding of 3D media in ways that push towards new understandings and inspire new ideas. Students will be moving onto a new project next week where they will be looking at architecture and structures.

Thinking About ArtPrize10

As we move into spring, we will also be moving into the season we start to think about this year's ArtPrize entry. Last year was the first year our school entered work. This year, we are hoping to enter again and our materials for the work began to arrive this week.

The K-12 Visual Arts team will be meeting soon to hammer out ideas for the overall look of our over 3000 bottle caps when they are painted by students, but regardless of what we create and if it is actually on display in a venue this fall, I am excited we are trying something new and coming together to make it happen.

If you are interested in more information, please contact me (especially if you are interested in hosting our work as a venue).

Photoshop Challenge 1

It is amazing to me that in three weeks of seeing this new group of students, they already have three works of art published on Artsonia. For their third work published, students created either a beginner, intermediate, or advanced level work based on a series of choices in Schoology. These series of challenges are designed to help students get a better feel for materials and create works that build skills and understanding in hopes they will be able to select those concepts for their personal works for major thematic units.

It was fun to see students make choices this week as they finished up these works and hear time and again that they enjoyed learning more about how to use Photoshop. Here are some examples of the types of works students created from beginner to more advanced skill-building challenges.

Gibson

Lucas

Zoe

Evan

Artist of Interest

Since moving to a thematically driven curriculum, it has been increasingly important to me for students to have as much exposure to a variety of artists using a variety of methods to create their art. I know I cannot possibly cover them all, or even come close, so one of the activities I engage students in is called "Artist of Interest."

In this activity, students are asked to use our digital subscription to Scholastic Art Magazine to access past issues and select an artist they think is interesting and that may inspire their work. Students are asked to describe the work using an element of art and principle of design, give their opinion of the work, as well as what meaning can be found in it as they write their response.

I do this as a discussion board in Schoology so that students can view each others responses and get exposure to dozens of artists that they might not otherwise see in our projects or challenges. This is also a great way to get students to read non-fiction texts, summarize and interpret what they are reading, and use examples and details to help support their ideas.

​Here are two great responses from this activity this week:

Tantamounter and 100 objects

This week in my 3D class, students were challenged to create another collaborative. In this team-building activity, students were told they were going to be copy machines and started by shopping the classroom for what they would like to see recreated. After about five minutes of "shopping," students had to exchange their object with another group and then they had about 25 minutes to make a copy using whatever they could find in the classroom.

Many classrooms have done a similar exercise with great success. It was great to see how students worked together to recreate these objects and how close they were able to come to the original using completely different materials. My favorite of the group is probably the spider below. The group's copy was created by a damaged styrofoam head for the body, a Pringles can and pompoms for the head and eyes, metal tubing for the legs, and felt for the striping details. I am still amazed that the groups did what they did in such a short period of time.

3D students also started their 100 object sculptures this week. This is a project that asks students to rethink non-art materials in new and creative ways. After sketching out ideas, students came prepared with a variety of things (Qtips, rocks, toothpicks, colored pencils, and more) to turn into sculptures.

I am excited to see how these come into form over the next week.

Looking Ahead

Because of the nature of the class, some students are actually thinking about their final projects and experimenting with options for it as they are also working on their 100 objects project. For their finals, students are asked to create a project of their choice. I am very excited to see how and what they decide. One student started experimenting with some ideas this week, using the 3Doodler pen that was recently funded through a DonorsChoose.org project. I think it will be really exciting to see how this turns out or changes along the way.

MAEA Region 9 Show

Thursday was the opening reception of the Michigan Art Education Association Region 9 Show at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. It was really fun to see students see their work on display at the museum. It was also great to see the Warhol show.

With 23 works from our k-12 Visual Arts Program on display, it was great to see our Bryon Center Artists celebrated in this way. The works will now move on to the State competition and we will find out the results from that part of the competition in March.

Digital Storytelling Match on DonorsChoose.org

We have had such an awesome amount of success this year getting special resources funded through DonorsChoose.org. I am so thankful to parents, friends, and interested donors for giving to our projects to ensure my students have access to equipment and materials that will push them as creatives in the classroom.

Portfolio Names

Every term, I use the design of the portfolio name as a visual way to learn my students names. It is a go-to project to get students started because it also helps me teach some basics about the design process, formulating ideas and planning in our sketchbook as well as practicing various colored pencil and marker techniques before applying them to our final works.

It was fun to see the student names develop over the week and then be published on our Artsonia gallery. Here are a few of the results:

I really like sports so I used a baseball and a basketball for the letter E's. Three of the letters were some type of plant because I like nature. The letter L turned out really good in my mind because it was the first time I attempted to draw a hand.

This project was really fun. I chose many things having to do with sports or professional sports teams because that is what I like to watch and do. I also did a pencil because I like to sketch and draw. I liked this project because I got to show the things that I like by writing my name

I put the Fishing pole with a fish because I fish a lot and really enjoy it, and I also put a paintbrush with paint , because I really like to paint. My favorite sport to play is ping pong and that's why I put a ping pong ball and paddle to include the types of sports that I like to play and what I like to do in my free time.

I choose these objects because I like the underwater sea life, drawing, ice cream, and nature.

Logo Designs

So, for the first time, I am actually seeing a group of students for a FULL year as a result of a new STEAM class I am teaching. As a result, I decided to change up the portfolio name to a logo design. This was fun to do because it got students thinking about branding and how logos are developed by designers. Because these students have had me last semester, it was also nice to see how quickly they jumped into the sketching and brainstorming piece of this challenge before setting to work on it.

Here are a few examples:

This logo is Charlie B. Golfing. The C is formed into a golf club and the B is formed into a golf ball on a tee ready to be swung. I picked golfing because I really like golfing and it is very chill and a fun hobby to do during the spring and summer.

In this I did a circle and inside the circle I did a C with a softball stitches in it, To finish the other half of the circle I did a pencil because I love art and lastly in the center I did a volleyball.

While designing my logo I thought about things that might represent me. My logo represents a crown as well as the first initial of my name. This is because I like to consider myself a queen or a princess. I chose to use colors like yellow and orange to represent the gold of a crown, and black to emphasize the letter M.

Starting Photoshop Challenge 1

Students also started their first Photoshop Challenge this week after they completed their portfolios. I have accumulated five choices over the years that students can select to complete as a part of this challenge. They range from beginner to advanced. All focus on the subject of portraits or people.

​As we finish these next week, it will be interesting to see which levels students selected to challenge themselves to create and if they continue to elect to use Photoshop as a tool when we get working on our first major Project in the class.

Still Painting Those Panels

We are still working on the WMS panels... hopefully they will finish up this week and actually work out. Right now, we are debating on how to outline the shapes. Do we outline everything, are we selective, or do we just paint over everything and start over?

Adjective Forms

In the KCAD 3D class I teach as a part of our high school's Dual Enrollment program, students worked on their ceramic forms this week that were inspired by adjectives. We were inspired by a variety of contemporary ceramic artists like Zemer Peled before going through lists of adjectives that would help inform the direction of their work.

Students were encouraged to hand-build or combine wheel-thrown and hand-building techniques. It was interesting to see how students developed their sketches based on the words they selected and then translated those sketches into forms.

​We will not see the completed pieces until these are fired, glazed, and fired again later this month.

MAEA Region 9 Results

BCPS has a great showing at this year's MAEA Region 9 Adjudication. K-12 students from our district had over 20 works accepted and all will move onto State competition. The work will be on display at the Grand Rapids Art Museum through this month before heading to the next competition.

​Here are the winners from WMS:

Oliver Modderman

Tess Bainbridge

Lindsay Mlejnek

Serenity Metzger

I am excited to celebrate this accomplishment with students at the opening reception this Thursday as we also get to enjoy the rest of the exhibit at the GRAM.